Core 2 Performance Coming to the Mac, Intel Version of Darwin Closed, IBM's 500 GHz Chip, and More

This Week's Macintel News

ExtremeTech has a performance preview of Intel's new Core 2 CPUs,
which we can expect to see in Apple's next generation of computers.
Fully expect to see Intel-based Power Mac and Xserve replacements
demonstrated with "Leopard" (Mac OS X 10.5) at the Worldwide Developers
Conference, August 7-11.

The Core 2 CPUs bring 64-bit computing, more power than the
current Core line, and improved energy efficiency. Don't be
surprised if the MacBook Pro goes Core 2 in the near future, perhaps
in July.

InfoWorld's Tim Yager is upset with Apple for closing Darwin for
Intel. Formerly the open source core of Mac OS X, the Intel
version of Darwin is no longer being made available. This should
thwart hackers from pirating OS X and selling it on non-Apple
hardware. Yager's concern is that power users will no longer be
able to tweak performance for their specific needs, but there's no
reason Apple or an independent developer can't develop tools to
perform those tweaks with no need to provide Darwin for Intel
source code.

On the CPU front, Intel is looking ahead to multicore CPUs with
as many as 10 core, IBM has run a chip at 500 GHz by dropping its
temperature near absolute zero, and Intel is now making more 65nm
chips than 90nm ones.

Tech News

Macintel News

Coming Soon to the Mac: Woodcrest, Conroe,
Merom

The Apple Core's Jason D. O'Grady says:

"Intel used an event in San Francisco yesterday to launch their
new server chip code-named 'Woodcrest.' (The official name 'Dual
Core Xeon' is not nearly as cool, but I digress.) According to
Intel the new chips are optimized for low power consumption and
provide more performance in key benchmarks - 35 percent less power
consumption while providing 80 percent more performance than prior
chips....

Core 2 Duo Performance Preview

ExtremeTech's Jason Cross reports:

"It would be the understatement of the year to say that Intel's
next-generation CPU architecture, known as the 'Core'
microarchitecture and shipping in the desktop chip 'Conroe' and
notebook chip 'Merom' is greatly anticipated. PC enthusiasts
looking to upgrade have been holding off for weeks on the prospects
that these new chips would be substantially faster and more energy
efficient than anything else on the market today.

"We got the chance to head down to Santa Clara and test the
desktop chip, known as Core 2 Duo, under Intel's supervision. Just
as we did when we tested the Core 2 Extreme last month, we performed
a series of benchmarks on machines set up by Intel. So don't
consider this a review. That will have to wait for the official
launch, when we'll have a slew of benchmarks run our own way on
systems we built ourselves. Still, this is a pretty exciting peek
at what kind of performance we can expect when the chips go on
sale."

Apple Closes Door on Intel Version of
Darwin

InfoWorld's Tom Yager reports:

"Apple is in the unique position of losing hardware sales to
software pirates. It faces the risk of cloned Macs being
distributed in foreign markets where intellectual property
protection is weak. I empathize. Still, there are ways to address
the piracy issue without stripping the critical and defining
quality of openness from OS X.

"Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel
edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating
system.

"Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to
alter, rebuild and replace the OS X kernel from source code.
Stripped of openness, it no longer possesses the quality that
elevated Linux to its status as the second most popular commercial
OS."

Fink Binary Distribution 0.8.1 Supports
PowerPC, Intel

PR: The Fink project is proud to announce the
availability of a new binary distribution, version 0.8.1 for Intel
and PowerPC.

Over 1,900 precompiled packages for PowerPC and 1,700 for the
Intel platform have been made available. Including new precompiled
packages for KDE, GNOME and many popular scientific
applications.

Improved documentation from the Fink website including
translations into French, Japanese and simplified Chinese.

Fink is free, licensed under the GPL.

This is a general public availability release for PowerPC and
Intel Macintosh computer. Fink urges you to observe that the Intel
platform is still considered "beta" quality, and a number of
packages (particularly packages in the "unstable" tree) either do
not compile, or compile but do not run. Work to improve this
situation is ongoing.

The Fink project would like to thank all the Contributors,
Package maintainers and long-term developers as well as the users
for downloading the prior release 0.8.0 almost 280_000 times.
Without the steady support of the community this project would have
not been and will not be successful.

First time Fink users should also observe the information
provided at:

Tech News

Intel's Plans Go Way Beyond Dual-core CPUs

eWeek's John G. Spooner reports:

"Intel is about to deliver the opening salvo in a wave of
multicore processors that could ultimately lead to chips with
scores of cores.

"The chip maker will begin the rollout of its Core
Microarchitecture - new chip circuitry that emphasizes power
efficiency - June 26 with the arrival of the dual-core 'Woodcrest'
Xeon 5100-series server chip. But Intel researchers said June 15
that they have already seen results with projects associated with
their Tera-scale Computing effort to explore processors containing
tens or even hundreds of cores.

"Intel has already implied that it is aiming for processors with
more than 10 processor cores by the end of the decade. However,
Tera-scale chips would look and act differently. They would be
built from numerous relatively simple general-purpose IA (Intel
Architecture) x86 processor cores - with the potential to include
specialized cores for some jobs-to boost performance by dividing up
jobs and running them in parallel."

IBM Pushes Supercooled Chip to 500 GHz

The Register's Tony Smith reports:

"Boffins from IBM and the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT)
have produced what they claim is the world's fastest silicon chip
thanks to what must be the acme of overclocking. The researchers
reached a clock speed of 500 GHz by reducing its temperature to
just 4.5° above absolute zero."

Intel Punching Out More 65nm than 90nm
Chips

The Register's Tony Smith reports:

"Intel has opened its third 65nm, 300mm-wafer processor
production facility, the result of an upgrade made to its Leixlip,
Ireland plant, the chip giant said yesterday. More than half of the
CPUs the company is now producing are 65nm parts, it added.

"The $2bn factory is in volume production. Dubbed Fab 24-2, it
joins Intel's other 65nm fabs, Fab 12 in Arizona and Fab D1D in
Oregon. Fab 24-2 has been punching out 65nm CPUs for three months
while Intel ramped up production to full output. That production
ramped helped push 65nm production beyond 90nm output levels."

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